Difficult Fruit

The Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize

Honorable Mention 2016

From the great many submissions we received this year, the editors chose "Kaan and Her Sisters Consider the Past" and "Remains in the Rift." These poems spoke to bridging those gaps that leave us holding the Difficult Fruit of loss and longing. We look forward to publishing quite a few of the 2016 contest submissions in the Spring 2017 issue! Many thanks to all of the talented poets who submitted their work to the 2016 Difficult Fruit Poetry Contest.

​Kaan and Her Sisters Consider the Past *kaan: a past tense verb, Arabic for 'was.'

Once upon makaan they gathered,Kaan and all the verbs that revel in negation.What did not happen to us, what had not taken place--these were the subjects they raised.What had not washed away, what had not yesterdayed--these were the predicates they demanded.

Kaan and her sisters were born for lamentation,for dividing time and denying its work.Miss Sahar taught us about this family in Arabic class,The somber sisters of story, and how they tell by takingtime away.

Once upon makaan they walked through the marketand the woman selling grape leaves called to themfrom the ground where she satand the girl making tea called to themfrom the window of her houseand the man selling sesame loaves called to themfrom his wooden cart

Ma kaan this our home once upon old time? Ma kaan an end to this story?

Once upon Jerusalem the boy collecting stones called out to them

Kaan a poem on this wallbut they keep trying to erase it.I hear the words calling out to me“If I do not burn and you do not burnthen who will light the way?”Back To List

Lena Tuffaha's poems have been published or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Borderlands Texas Review, Barrow Street, Blackbird, Sukoon, and the Massachusetts Review. Herchapbook, Arab in Newsland, won the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize, selected by Poet January Gill O'Neill, and will be published in March 2017. Her first full-length collection, Water & Salt, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in April 2017.​

Remains in the Rift

After the tsunami took his wife, Takamatsu tookup deep sea diving to try and find her. After a few yearshe had learned that the bodies of drowned peopleare usually found poised with buttocks high,hands and feet dangling. The corpses of scuba diversare like dead bugs, on their backs,hands and feet floating. He keeps diving, he says, becauseit’s where he feels closest to her. Heidegger called this typeof pain a metaphoric rift that holds together thingsthat have been torn apart. A rift to create a new spacethat keeps the connection.

What will perish when I perishis the image of her standing at our kitchen counter, in front of the sink,hip almost as high as the linewhere the back of her elbow breaksin the handling of sudsy dishes. It’s wherewe had most of our arguments,after replenishmentrefueling with the meal usually I’d been the one to cook.What remains in our rift, our decades of drift, is the lookof her haunch poisedin its reveal of that long, smooth curve of her thighas the right arm dangles a hand, robotically, towards the next dish.

Janet Joyner's poems have appeared in numerous magazines, among them American Athenaeum, The Cincinnati Review, The Comstock Review, Emrys Journal, Pembroke Magazine, and Main Street Rag. Her prize winning poems are honored in the 201l Yearbook of the South Carolina Poetry Society, Bay Leaves of the North Carolina Poetry Council in 2010, 2011, and in Flying South in 2014 and 2015, as well as anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, volume vii: North Carolina; and Second Spring 2016 Anthology. Her first collection of poems, Waterborne, is the winner of the Holland Prize and was published in February, 2016, by Logan House Press. Her short stories have appeared in The Crescent Review, Flying South, and Second Spring Anthology 2016. She is the translator of Le Dieu désarmé by Luc-François Dumas. She lives and writes in Winston-Salem, NC.